Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Good survey, but recent development trends burdons July 27, 2007
Kasper Graversen (Europe)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Good book. Covers a lot of ground and gives a good survey of the field. Time is on its back, however. The use of web frameworks such as Struts or Spring, and the use of ORM tools such as Hibernate or JPA makes much of the book "redundant". Such tools although solving a lot of practical problems, also introduces many new ones. Maybe a new edition of the book should cover such ground.
Useful but J2EE biased July 30, 2006
C. Jack (Edinburgh)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I'm a .NET developer and, since the book advertises the fact that it covers .NET as well as J2EE I had high hopes. By and large it lived up to them but in some places I think it let itself down.
In particular the majority of the code is in Java. I don't mind mentally mapping from Java to C#, however its the differences between the framework libraries that creates the problem as I simply cannot do that mapping.
Despite this the book is OK, if you concentrate on the patterns themselves then your fine but I think Java developers will get far more from it as they're going to learn not just the patterns but details you need to be aware of when applying them.
key book for enterprise patterns July 29, 2006
Thing with a hook
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Even if you find enterprise stuff immensely dull, dealing with databases and web pages is a pretty common task, most of the action in software development revolves around it, and who wants to be completely ignorant of the the alphabet soup of various technologies the IT blogs, books and websites are floating in?
So if you must immerse yourself in this area, what better than a Martin Fowler book? The code is mainly in Java, with a fairly large smattering of C#. It would probably help if you understood some basics of enterprise development in those languages, e.g. servlets and JDBC for Java.
The patterns in this book cover organising domain logic, database mapping and access, web presentation, concurrency, and the book finishes by covering base patterns, a mixture of lower level abstractions of the sort covered in Fowler's first book Analysis Patterns (e.g. Money) and those that bear a close resemblance to the classic vanilla Gang of Four patterns, with an enterprise twist (e.g. Plugin and Gateway). Nearly all the other patterns refer to these, so I don't know why these didn't appear first. Apart from that though, the book is very well organised. And the opening essay, that discusses the trade offs of every pattern and how they fit together in an application, is immensely helpful.
Wizened enterprisers looking for new material will not find much new here, but surely the point of patterns catalogues are to get down on paper the practices of those same wizened enterprisers, not to strike off in new directions. Therefore, an experienced developer should see this as a way to organise what they already know, and maybe in doing so, reveal some new insights.
A newcomer to enterprise development will definitely get a lot out of this, as the underpinnings to the plethora of modern enterprise applications are laid bare. You're not going to become a Hibernate, Struts or EJB expert from this book, but you should at least have a clue about what problems they're trying to solve.
As usual, Fowler manages to be a model of clarity, while still injecting regular touches of wry humour, quite an achievement given the potentially bone-dry material. If you want to know the basics of enterprise software, start here.
 Save time! Pragmatic, simple and effective March 15, 2006
Gonçalo Graça Gonçalves Melo
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A very well written and pragmatic book about software architectural patterns.For all the different approches, defines clearly the context of the solution, and, in a critical and structured way, shows the differences among then. Is a book about structured and patronized solutions for typical problems in every day life of all programmers. So instead losing precious hours in front of a computer trying to reinvent the wheel, read this book and learn the some of the best practices from some of the best programmers in the world.
 Good for high level summary. Not complete picture though June 8, 2004
14 out of 24 found this review helpful
Don't really like the way book describes a method in one class then a method in another, then switches back to first class after some explanatory text. Would have much preferred to see complete listings, with section headings and explanatory text with same section headings. It's only when you assemble everything together you find there are a lot of missing pieces that are never described. I dived right in to O/R Mapping section and found a lot of method calls and classes that were not discussed further making for only half the picture.
Plus I was a bit disillusioned that author now states on his web site he doesn't have time to respond to emails, so I'll think twice before purchasing another of his books.
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